A Hunter's Confession. David Carpenter O.
books on archery and black-powder rifles. There are anthologies (sometimes referred to as bibles) of hunting stories, by which I mean bang em ’n bag em stories, of great hunts throughout North America, and travel books on safaris to Africa and other continents in search of trophy heads.
But in this library, one of the most intensively used in all of North America, on any given day, there are a mere dozen or so books on those same shelves that have nothing at all to do with the how-to approach to sport hunting, nothing at all to do with the glory of the conquest, one well-heeled nimrod to another, bragger’s rights to the biggest trophy head and all that hairy-chested stuff. These dozen volumes rest on the shelf like lepers at a bus stop. David Petersen’s A Hunter’s Heart is one such book. The stories he has anthologized here all demonstrate a strong empathy for the wild creatures the hunters pursue. Invariably, the writers are conservation-minded people (Jimmy Carter, Tom McGuane, Edward Abbey, Jim Harrison, Ted Kerasote) who happen to love hunting. Rick Bass’s Caribou Rising is about defending an Arctic caribou herd, the Gwich’in hunting culture, and the wildlife refuge that is their home. James Swan’s In Defense of Hunting is a Jungian analysis of the sport hunter’s psyche.
These brave dozen or so are misfits among the shelves of hunting books in the 799.2 section. They are, let’s face it, nerds among jocks. At night when all the patrons have gone home, I can well imagine that the great army of how-to books and safari adventure books gang up on the sensitive ones and call them names that impugn their masculinity.
My point is that the sheer bulk of hairy-chested-gentleman hunting literature generates the illusion that sport hunting is in some mysterious way superior to subsistence hunting. I am tempted to believe that the writers and readers of this material consider that subsistence hunting, done mostly by Aboriginal people throughout the world, is not only less interesting and less heroic but less appropriate in defining the hunting narrative of our time.
Indeed, the paleoanthropologists of the next few centuries may well turn their attention away from dogsled and snowshoe cultures in the Far North and descend upon the dismantled and buried suburban malls and their sporting goods emporia, seeking out evidence of the great hunters of the early second millennium, the primitives who stirred fossil fuels into the mix. The people who hunted from cars along the side roads as I did with my father (Homo automobilis). The more sophisticated men who transported all-terrain vehicles in trucks and set them loose on timber roads because of their loathing for walking in the woods and fields (Homo outof-shapiens). And of course the northerly tribe of hunters who were so evolved that they could run down deer and coyotes to exhaustion in the deep snow and shoot them (Homo snowmobilis).
SPORT HUNTING IN North America aspired to be the sport of kings. The Theban chariots may well have evolved into jeeps and all-terrain vehicles, but sport hunting in North America evolved from one kind of feudal system or another. In various European countries, members of the landed gentry could secure hunting rights on vast estates, but their tenants had to poach their game to feed themselves. In North America, hunting for sport came out of the earliest leisure societies on plantations, ranches, and wilderness forests. Not only was it one of the privileges accorded to the landed gentry, but it came with the conquest of the land, the westward march of American and Canadian settlers, and the rigors of pioneer life. Hunting in North America developed into a beloved pastime that combined the gentlemanly appeal of golf with the shoot-em-up savor of the Wild West.
By the late seventeenth century, trappers, traders, and commercial hunters had spread out all over the North American continent in search of beaver, buffalo, bear, moose, and anything else of commercial value. As these incursions increased in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the impact on wildlife became catastrophic. As we have seen, the buffalo declined to near-extinction. The plains grizzlies all but disappeared. The last remnants of this population sought refuge in the Swan Hills of northern Alberta, and their future there is in grave danger. The passenger pigeons completely disappeared.
If there was one man who came to define hunting for sport in North America, it was Theodore Roosevelt, renowned trophy hunter, scientist, historian, war hero, naturalist, and politician. He embodied the whole tradition, from hunting to fill the larder, as early settlers had done, to hunting on safari for trophies. From his experiences of hunting, especially in the American West, he became the popular embodiment of the great white hunter. When he finished his years in the White House, he went on safari to Africa, where he hunted from Kenya to the southern Sudan. There he managed to kill at least two of every species of animal that he could find. At least two is putting it mildly. For some species he went as high as eighteen trophies. His total bag was five hundred and twelve. Let me put that in numbers: 512 dead animals. He must have seen them all as Democrats.
But Roosevelt was also one of North America’s most influential conservationists. He worked hard to establish strict laws to protect wildlife from being slaughtered by hunters who had no love for the animals they pursued. He fought, with real success, to protect wildlife habitat by helping to establish national forest reserves, national parks, and zoos. The following credo, written by Roosevelt around 1910, was thought to be a rather progressive stance at the time:
I never sought to make large bags, for a hunter should not be a game butcher. It is always lawful to kill dangerous or noxious animals, like the bear, cougar, and wolf; but other game should only be shot when there is need of the meat, or for the sake of an unusually fine trophy. Killing a reasonable number of bulls, bucks, or rams does no harm whatever to the species; to slay half the males of any kind of game would not stop the natural increase, and they yield the best sport, and are the legitimate objects of the chase. Cows, does, and ewes, on the contrary, should only be killed (unless barren) in case of necessity.
POACHERS WERE ROOSEVELT’S enemies. Sportsmen from influential American families were his friends. He hunted with the social elites of the Boone and Crockett Club, which he helped found, but he also hunted with wranglers and squatters. He combined the traditions of the European aristocrat and the North American maverick. His hunting ethic and his example were very much alive in my father’s memory, an orthodoxy to which many sport hunters belonged. In a profound and pervasive sense, the boys and men of America in the first half of the twentieth century and beyond were all skulking through the bushes with Teddy Roosevelt.
This brief history of hunting leaves us with two traditions: subsistence hunting and hunting for the fun of it. Both traditions survive to this day and face off along the shrinking habitats with a persistent level of antipathy. But between the two traditions are vital connections that should not be ignored. Some Native people, for example, have turned to sport hunting in recent years, and non-Aboriginal people engage in subsistence hunting as well.
Aldo Leopold, the naturalist from Wisconsin, who hunted for subsistence and for the fun of it, considers both sport hunting and subsistence hunting in his classic A Sand County Almanac (1949). He reminds us that Aboriginal culture often coalesces around the pursuit of wild game. Among (largely white) people who hunt and fish for the sport of it, the cultural landscape is very different, but the culture manages through hunting to reengage with its wild origins by renewing contact with wild things. From hunting, Leopold tells us, hunters can affirm three important cultural values.
First, “there is value in any experience that reminds us of our distinctive national origins and evolution.” Leopold sees this awareness as “nationalism in its best sense.” He doesn’t talk about nationalism in its worst sense, the history of wholesale slaughter and conquest that seems to be part of the colonial heritage and does not need to be reenacted. Instead, he gives us examples that may well have come from his own boyhood: a boy scout has “tanned a coonskin cap, and goes Daniel-Booneing in the willow thicket below the tracks. He is re-enacting American history.” A young boy who traps rodents is “reenacting the romance of the fur trade.”
The second cultural value derived from hunting and other engagements with the wild is “any experience that reminds us of our dependency on the soil-plant-animal-man food chain, and of the fundamental organization of the biota [Leopold’s term for living organisms in the environment].” Leopold quotes a nursery song about bringing home a rabbit skin “to wrap the baby bunting in.” This folk song is Leopold’s reminder of the time when human tribes hunted to feed and clothe